Recently I've started thinking about the future of LipsEngine.While looking at the current iteration and its editor I've found that there were quite a few things that didn't work out as planned or as great as I wanted them to be. Lots of things were just left unfinished or just fleshed out as much as I needed them to be to get the rendering done, which I tried to make the 'main attraction' of LipsEngine. Another reason might have just been that I was kind of in a hurry to finish it because my last semester at the Games-Academy was coming to an end and I had to get 'something' done that I could show people for portfolio purposes...Anyway... I've decided to give LipsEngine an (almost complete) makeover with some remnants of the old revision still being found here and there.So to get to the point here are a few ideas and decisions that will be the focus of LipsEngine 2.0:

With that being said...let me give you some examples of things to come in the future:

Multithreaded using a task based distribution system

Physics (not sure how far I'll go here though)

Animation System (again, not sure how much time I'll invest in here)

x64-based

Make the back-buffer resizable in editor view (LipsEngine 1.X was restricted to a fixed resolution here for simplicity)

Some kind of Game System, so you can actually make a game with LipsEngine (duh!) (Mildly similar to modding UnrealEngine, scripting system not planned at this point)

Better RenderInterface & more generic to support different API's like DirectX & OpenGL (LipsEngine 1.X had this a little bit in mind but in the end was definitely more focused on getting DirectX done)

Actual (separate) Game executable that can be launched in some kind of 'Game-Mode' from the editor or just as an autonomous application outside of the editor (LipsEngine 1.X was completely bound to the Editor and could only be run in there)

Again, simpler and more straight forward Editor UI & Controls (basically to not make it painful to create a scene)

Removing Post-Processing options all together and splitting it up into more logical components/windows e.g. Time/Day Settings Window (can change tonemapping here?) + Camera Settings Window that can modify bloom / lens flare / etc... (This was an aspect of LipsEngine 1.X that I wanted to completely rework since it came out as such a mess having everything crammed inside this so called 'World Settings' Tab.

Clean Rendering (!) (This is one of the most fundamental things wrong with my Renderer. I've recently gotten to the point of really appreciating clean renderings that use MSAA or other kinds of anti-aliasing solutions like SMAA T2X or more recently the research done by Matt Pettineo to reduce specular anti-aliasing).

Focus more on performance than just putting out slow techniques (Might implement some kind of Graphics Settings so you could switch e.g DoF from a regular approach to one with bokeh if you wanted to). Still I'm on the opinion that things like SSAO or environment reflections are an important part of the lighting equation and should not be 'effects' that can be turned on and off.

Forward+ Rendering (Tiled Forward Shading)

Support Meshes with several material ID's for different parts (LipsEngine 1.X could only import 'static' meshes and only one material for the entire mesh)

FileSystem watcher for updated resources (shader, textures,...)

Particle System (something GPU based)

Now there's also some other aspects that I'd love to do some research / testing if I get the time which might or might not be something I'll get to:

Ocean Rendering (seems like a very advanced topic with not much information to go on but still intriguing)

Skin Shading (extremely impressed by the recent research done by Jorge Jimenez on this topic, would love to be able to dip into this kind of thing)